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    Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime—from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door
    Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime—from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door
    Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime—from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door
    Audiobook8 hours

    Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime—from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door

    Written by Brian Krebs

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    There is a Threat Lurking Online with the Power to Destroy Your Finances, Steal Your Personal Data, and Endanger Your Life.

    In Spam Nation, investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs unmasks the criminal masterminds driving some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts. Tracing the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies—and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks—he delivers the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere.

    Blending cutting-edge research, investigative reporting, and firsthand interviews, this terrifying true story reveals how we unwittingly invite these digital thieves into our lives every day. From unassuming computer programmers right next door to digital mobsters like "Cosma"—who unleashed a massive malware attack that has stolen thousands of Americans' logins and passwords—Krebs uncovers the shocking lengths to which these people will go to profit from our data and our wallets.

    Not only are hundreds of thousands of Americans exposing themselves to fraud and dangerously toxic products from rogue online pharmacies, but even those who never open junk messages are at risk. As Krebs notes, spammers can—and do—hack into accounts through these emails, harvest personal information like usernames and passwords, and sell them on the digital black market. The fallout from this global epidemic doesn't just cost consumers and companies billions, it costs lives too.

    Fast-paced and utterly gripping, Spam Nation ultimately proposes concrete solutions for protecting ourselves online and stemming this tidal wave of cybercrime—before it's too late.

    "Krebs's talent for exposing the weaknesses in online security has earned him respect in the IT business and loathing among cybercriminals.… His track record of scoops…has helped him become the rare blogger who supports himself on the strength of his reputation for hard-nosed reporting." —Bloomberg Businessweek

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateNov 18, 2014
    ISBN9781501210396
    Author

    Brian Krebs

    Brian Krebs is an award-winning journalist and founder of the highly acclaimed cybersecurity blog KrebsOnSecurity.com. For fourteen years, Krebs was a reporter for the Washington Post, where he authored the acclaimed Security Fix blog. He has been profiled in the New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek and has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, Fox, ABC News, in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and more.

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    Reviews for Spam Nation

    4.5/5

    29 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Spam Nation sounds really interesting but fails to be compelling.

      For starters, it's incredibly disorganized. Krebs talks about one thing for one chapter, then something else for another chapter, then back to the first thing, and so on. A lot of information is repeated throughout the book, often alongside new information, so you might read a passage for a couple minutes before you realize, "Hey, didn't I already read this?"

      It's hard to say what the book is about at all. Maybe "pharmacy spam", in a general sense, but beyond that it's just a mishmash. At the beginning, Krebs introduces the book as a sort of saga of the feud between two major cybercrime figures. While this is loosely covered throughout most of the book, there is a lot of rambling on other topics as well. He talks about efforts to stop spam and the spread of malware; how malware is spread; the reasons people choose buy pharmaceuticals from shady online pharmacies; Russian politics in relation to the spam industry; one-off mini-biographies on other people involved in spam; and many other multi-page digressions.

      All the topics could be interesting, especially if Spam Nation followed a narrative format, but there are simply too many topics for them to be covered in much depth. Chapter 4 (in case I got the number wrong, it's the one where he interviews people who bought from online pharmacies) was the most interesting to me and the only one that didn't at any point feel like a chore to read. Throughout the first two-thirds of the book, Krebs hypes up an event that turns out to be very anticlimactic and unrewarding, which left me annoyed because it had been the main reason I kept reading.

      I'm not sure who the target audience for Spam Nation is - Krebs sometimes defines terms that are common knowledge for most computer users, but at several points he used terms I've never heard of and didn't provide a definition. There are several very simple terms that he explains numerous times throughout the book, as if he forgot he had already done so.

      The writing style shifts around constantly. Sometimes it feels like a newspaper article, sometimes a memoir, occasionally narrative nonfiction, and sometimes like a Buzzfeed article.

      I wasn't going to mention this but it's in other reviews so I will point out that the early part of the book displays some really bad narcissism. After the first few chapters it tones down though, so I wasn't as annoyed by it as people who gave up on the book early on.

      Overall Spam Nation was a tedious read. I don't feel like I know more about cybercrime or spam than I did before, and I didn't find the loose narrative interesting in the way it was presented.
    • 4/5
      Brian Krebs is something of an authority on internet security, so the story is well-informed and well-told. He reaches the people behind spam, and their story is certainly fascinating. The downside was simply that although this book is only a few months old, it already feels very dated. It's a book about spammers in the previous decade, not this one.
    • 4/5
      Spam is a Russian industry. There are competitors, partnerships, even contests for most responses. Incredibly (to us), spam delivered in Russia actually offers links to spamming services at the bottom of the spam, so that your business too, can benefit. The drug spam industry is financed by American consumers, who want to save money, avoid going to doctors, or even deal prescription drugs to others. The spammers fill a genuine void and satisfy a genuine demand in a twisted healthcare system. This is the story that Brian Krebs reveals, in dramatic, fascinating and fine detail.The online “pharmacies” contract with fabs in India and China, just like the majors do. Goods are shipped by them directly to the customer. Refunds are easier to obtain than from US firms, because the spammers don’t want their card processors to fine them or cut them off. And better customer service leads to reorders (!). And if they don’t, aggressive outbound telemarketing takes over. They have supply chains, with acquirers of botnets, renters of botnets, pharmacies, affiliate programs and spammers – all getting a cut of the transaction or an upfront fee. So very few get crazy rich. Some had to take legitimate day jobs to make ends meet. Eventually, those legitimate tech jobs became more attractive than the dark ones, so recruiting became a problem. Truly, a parallel universe.The drug spam segment is in clear decline:1) The Achilles Heel of the spammers is that they are not totally vertical. They can collect e-mail addresses, they can create botnets, they can accept and fulfill orders. But they can’t process payment. So credit card companies and Microsoft have gone after banks, card processors and transfer agents, making business impossible for the drug spammers. They built their own universe with their own rules, but stopped short. Eventually, it had to collapse.2) The other weak link is Russia, which harbored them. How long that would last was always questionable, but Russia is so corrupt that spammers bribed officials to investigate and close down their competitors. It was a war of attrition where eventually everyone had to lose. Overall, it was a self-inflicted, two pronged attack – on itself.And it’s not all a semi-legitimate economy. They also evolved from scareware (your computer is not safe) to ransomware (all your files are now encrypted). And there’s the constant selling of personal information.Krebs follows a cast of kingpins through their rise and fall. It’s a passion that cost him his career at the Washington Post, which changed “policy” so he could no longer publish his blockbuster stories. (Krebs had been the reason for the crippling and shutdown of major botnets, himself) He has kept going, following through to the end of the kingpins’ rule, and ends the book with tips on not just how, but why you need to protect your accounts. It’s all chilling and gripping, and unfortunately real.David Wineberg
    • 5/5
      A bit old but it provides a lot of interesting and useful information. Online security becomes more important by the day. Real insights into so called Canadian pharmacies. It ends with some practical advice about staying safe online.
    • 5/5
      Brian Krebs is a journalist focused on cybercrime. His 2014 book, Spam Nation: the Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime -from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door, is an excellent read for anyone interested in this common form of crime. He opens the ebook version with an explanation of the title, which I think is helpful.This book isn’t just about spam. By the end, Krebs has walked you through issues of where spam is hosted and why it’s hard to shut down. He explains botnets, the spammer community, and discusses both the malware they distribute as well as attacks they made on their opponents (and business partners!).I was skeptical when I picked it up but it’s both a well-written and fascinating read. Krebs drives the story through the conflict between two successful spammers. He introduces a panoply of related characters, both with his own prose as well as their ICQ chat history.He corrected two misconceptions that I had. First, that the people who click on spam are idiots. He spoke to some of the people who purchased drugs through spam links and found some rational reasons for their doing so. In fact, the discussion of buyers in Chapter 4 is as much about the high cost of pharmaceuticals in the US and the lower cost in India and China as it is spam.That spam was, in the case of pharma, a business enabler also surprised me. I’d assumed that all spam was essentially to deliver a negative payload (malware, viruses, etc.). Much of it is. I’ve never clicked on a link, but was surprised that people who did sometimes actually got what they were paying for.The book wraps up with an interesting timeline of government takedowns of botnets and the tightening of credit card payment systems. Krebs notes the rise in ransomware and gives a good explanation of its impact. He even includes an epilogue with tips on better password management and keeping systems patched. Unpatched routers and PCs are part of the reason the botnets and spammers are so successful.I find this sort of book – and Joseph Menn‘s Fatal System Error, which Krebs mentions – fascinating. As an end recipient of a great deal of spam, running my own e-mail servers as well as e-mail accounts, it is a part of every day Internet life. Krebs tells an interesting story about where it comes from and why.
    • 4/5
      I've always found the economy behind spam kind of interesting, and this book does an interesting job at shedding light on how spam works, both in terms of who's doing it and how, and also in terms of who is buying and why.